


Of Mealworms and Other Mishaps

by adverbialstarlight



Series: voltron bingo stuff [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Friendship, Gen, Minor Character Death, POV Keith (Voltron), but lance just wants to name the worms, except not really because it's a worm lmao, fuck mealworms, keith cares a lot about getting the lab done, oh yeah this is for voltron bingo btw, they're biology lab partners, this little fic is literally me projecting how much I hate biology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-04 21:34:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15849801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adverbialstarlight/pseuds/adverbialstarlight
Summary: It's third period. Biology. All Keith wants to do is get through the class quickly as possible and go to lunch, something that usually isn't much of a problem, except today the science department has decided to subject them something even worse than pig dissections– mealworms. Will Keith survive without throwing a chair at his lab partner, or will Lance successfully name all thirty of their larva and cause Keith to dump an entire bag of mulch over his head by the end of the period?Aka a shitty awkward platonic klance high school au I wrote partly for my voltron bingo cards and partly to procrastinate doing my biology homework.





	Of Mealworms and Other Mishaps

**Author's Note:**

> For voltron bingo prompt High School AU on AU card and modern AU on klance card. Warning, not edited or proof read so if I majorly fucked up in grammar somewhere (most of this was written at 1 am oops) or there's some weird typo or autocorrect (also was written on my phone, again, oops) feel free to yell at me in the comments so I can fix it. Anyway, enjoy.

Keith liked to think that he was the kind of guy that respected nature– he liked snowboarding, feeding wild chipmunks, and climbing trees– but mealworms were where he had to draw the line.

They were the current bane of his existence as he cursed the school’s science department– namely the biology teachers that designed this lab in the first place– and picked up one of the disgusting creatures with two plastic paint brushes, using them like chopsticks and tossing it into the empty petri dish with three other worms. He wrinkled his nose in disgust as the mealworm dropped and immediately started wiggling towards the connected petri dish filled with mulch.

Four down, only six more to go.

From the moment their teacher had explained what they’d be doing today Keith knew he would hate it. They were to test the reaction of mealworms to different environments, something that would’ve been fine if it didn’t require working with live– mostly live, some of them were dead and therefore useless to their experiment– squishy, absolutely abhorrent _mealworms_. And to make it worse, they had to work with their desk neighbor, who in this case was Lance, the slightly obnoxious and overly enthusiastic guy that had irritated– and maybe sometimes awed– Keith since their freshman year.

Keith turned to Lance now, who was unhelpfully sitting atop the counter they were working on and doodling smiling squiggles that Keith assumed were supposed to be mealworms on his lab paper. Lance would be _much_ more tolerable if he actually helped do their goddamn lab.

He held out the beaker holding the remaining six test subjects in front of Lance’s face, immediately busying his hands with writing down initial data into the neatly sketched table. “I genuinely could not care less if you want to fail this lab, but I don’t so can you maybe try to help me do this? These things are _disgusting_ ,” Keith said bluntly, scowling down at the worms again.

“Aww, these little things?” Lance cooed, dumping the beaker out onto his palm, oats, worms, and all. Keith made a noise of disgust and shifted away as Lance picked one up gently with his free hand. “I’m going to name you Blue,” he told the mealworm.

Keith scoffed. “Are you seriously naming one of our worms? You know that thing is brown and we’ll be replacing them with another batch in like ten minutes, right?”

Lance dropped Blue the brown mealworm into the barren petri dish and shrugged, sifting through the oats to find the next worm. “Maybe she’ll become a blue beetle,” he countered, eyebrow raised. A moment later he lifted another worm, this one violently attempting to free itself from his fingers. “And you’ll be, hmm… Red,” he announced, dropping it into the soil side.

“Unbelievable,” he said, watching Red start to burrow into the soil, though he was unable to keep the amused smile from his lips. This lab was pretty stupid; it was clear that pretty much all of the mealworms were going to choose the soil unless it was dead or unmoving overall. And what difference did it make if they changed the damn soil every trial? Keith huffed, this was going to take up to the very end of the period considering they had to do at least three trials– each being five minutes long at minimum– and Lance was still pondering over names for the worms that would be used by other classmates in six minutes and then fed to some thirteen year old’s iguana.

“Can you just drop the rest of them in so we can actually start the lab,” Keith said finally, swallowing his disgust and prying Wormbilton McWormy from Lance’s fingers and tossing the worm into the soil. The last three followed quickly and Keith started the stopwatch on his phone.

“Damn, impatient much?” Lance said, leaning forward to stare at the worms.

“No, you're just wasting time naming worms and not doing anything,” Keith countered, crossing his arms. “If you wanna fail, okay, whatever, fine, but there's only like ten minutes left and I am not coming in for lunch.”

The other boy was unphased, instead he frowned down at the petri dish. There was only one worm still visible, and it seemed to have no intentions on moving from its tightly coiled position in the middle of the empty petri dish. Lance poked at the worm with his pencil.

“Is it dead?” Keith asked, leaning over as well.

The mealworm didn’t react.

Irritation sparked in Keith and he glared down at it, as if he could intimidate it back to life. When he’d picked up the beaker, all ten worms had been alive, he'd checked each one of them, so this one could not _possibly_ have already died.

The worm didn’t even twitch when Lance prodded at it again, this time with more force. It was dead, and it had only been ten minutes since it had come into the boys’ possession.

After a moment Lance sighed and nodded. “Yep it’s dead,” he confirmed., scooping the dead worm out of the petri dish and onto the counter. “Goddammit, Shiro, you couldn’t have stayed alive just a little bit longer.” 

It was kind of disgusting and Keith probably would have commented on it or thrown the mealworm in the dead worm tub himself, but there were other incomprehensible things that needed explanation more than the worm needed to be disposed of.

“Did you seriously name one of our worms after my _brother_ ,” Keith said incredulously.

He understood that Lance idolized Shiro a bit– most people did; it was impossible not to with his excellent grades, romance novel esque relationship that had been going for almost two years, and kind, charismatic personality, everything anyone would ever want, really– but Keith didn’t think that Lance would take it so far as to name one of their biology lab mealworms after him. There was of course the bias of living with the older teen heavily influencing his opinion, but Keith found it baffling as to why any of his peers would view Shiro as someone worthy of naming a larva after.

Or maybe it was fitting, Keith decided a moment later, recalling how his brother had eaten the last slice of carrot cake a few weeks ago. The carrot cake that was explicitly marked ‘ _Keith_ ’ in bold, red letters that he’d really been looking forward to eating.

Only a disgusting, slimy, heartless worm would do something that cruel.

Lance shrugged and started to copy down the data and scientific question Keith had scribbled at the beginning of class while Lance had been making his terrible illustrations. He probably would’ve been annoyed at this on another day, but he was still in the initial aftershock of Lance naming one of their – now dead– mealworms after _Shiro_. “I mean, I had to name him _something_ , you know– hey, is that a nine or seven?”

Keith glanced over to see a genuinely confused expression on Lance’s face. “Nine, sorry my handwriting is shitty.”

“Cool, I’ll go get us another worm,” he said, dropping his pencil and swiping up the dead worm. “Hopefully Shiro 2.0 won’t die.”

Keith laughed. “Yeah, hopefully. I think once is enough.”

He picked up his pencil to erase the numbers entered in the second row of the data table. Having to start over was a bit irritating, but if Lance was going to be the one handling the worms for the rest of the lab then it might turn out alright.

A moment later Lance returned, a large grin on his face. “Alright, Shiro 1.0’s clone brother is here, alive and ready for testing!”

“Uh, actually we’ve got to take the rest of the worms out and replace the soil.”

“Dammit.”

**Author's Note:**

> Okay first of all, I am shocked this managed to stay under 2k words because literally the only way that I know how to write is in full length novel style wow. And because of that, sorry that this sucked, I don't know how to end something that's only half a scene long so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯. Also this is essentially me complaining about a biology lab from a few weeks ago and mealworms except from Keith's POV so it was doomed from the start lol. Second, this is one of my only fics that were not named after an early 2000s pop punk song from my iPod I'm so proud.
> 
> Anyway, this was also written for my AU and klance cards for Voltron Bingo and I'll be posting my other pieces on here too because they're all going to be writing now since my fecking graphics tablet decided to break :))))
> 
> Yeah so thank you for reading, have a great day/night/whatever and bye
> 
>  
> 
> [my tumblr if ya want](http://adverbialstarlight.tumblr.com)


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